The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The new fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was woven from a rich Italian Renaissance past, dominated right up to 1800 by the giant Cinquecento figures of Raphael and Titian. Over this period there was gradual change rather than a break at any specific point. Titian seems to merge into Tintoretto, who already constructs a highly personal but Baroque world; the same is true of El Greco, whose stormy visionary art may be taken either as a final manifestation of the Renaissance or as a prelude to the full Baroque of the seventeenth century. But there was a significant shift before the end of the sixteenth century, a shift destined to have important effects on nearly all the great European artists of the subsequent period. The finest flower of the Venetian Renaissance was withering: it expired with the death of Tintoretto in 1594. In the following year Annibale Carracci left his native Bologna for Rome where he was to settle. Already the other great North Italian painter, Caravag-gio, was working in Rome. In 1600 Rubens arrived in Italy, and in the following year he visited Rome for the first time. Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Rome held a trinity of talent in three artists who stand as the founder-figures and representatives of their century. As the century progressed Rome became more firmly entrenched as the artistic capital, not merely of Italy, but of all Europe. Venice retained the prestige of its great past; the sixteenth-century Venetian school exercised enormous and significant influence on virtually every great seventeenth-century painter. An oscillation was set up between the two poles, Venice and Rome. Sometimes they could be synthesized, but often they were directly opposed, and their dichotom/ was expressed in such quarrels as those over color and drawing, or nature versus antiquity. The contribution of Venice remained, however, in the past, for during the seventeenth century it utterly failed to produce a great painter and only temporarily accommodated great painters from elsewhere. Rome was the modern meeting place of living talents, the most active center of patronage. Through it there passed Rubens and Van Dyck and Velázquez; Claude and Poussin settled there, as did Elsheimer. Of leading native painters, the Carracci and Cara- 5 u-